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Plenary Lecture

Managing Software and Enterprise Complexity

Dr. Ionel Botef
School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Aeronautical Engineering
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa
Email: ionel.botef@wits.ac.za

Abstract: Studies show that software development, integration, and implementation within a manufacturing enterpriseface complex organisational, technical, and social shortcomings. As a result of these shortcomings, business reengineering projects often fail due to the enormous gap between the IT infrastructure and the corresponding demands of the new processes. Enterprise complexity includes issues such as inflexible, centralized, and monolithic system architectures, inherent instable processes, mixture of continuous and batch operations, incomplete and/or excessive data, changed processes, or temporal problems. However, in addition to these, many times, software systems in the real world wereconsidered large and complex and the IT architecture didn’t reduce application complexity and provide its required flexibility.Therefore, the purpose of this plenary lecture is to explore how the complexity of both software and enterprise can be effectively and successfully managed.Based on the research's qualitative findings supported by authorities, evidence, or logic, essentially, it is argued that thearchitecture of a new software system should be aligned with the manufacturing system structure, its characteristics, the new technologies, and that the use the wisdom of simplicity in order to control complexity should prevail against the attempt to develop complex systems that usually are a consequence of unnecessary requirements.This exploration also leads to the need for an enterprise informationarchitecture framework for problem solving that should be aligned with the business practices and the ways in which the companies are run, and which finally leads to a system of systems which is architectural-centric, process-centric, human-centric, and in line with the IT infrastructure trends.

Brief Biography of the Speaker: Ionel Botef graduated in 1977 from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania, with a Masters in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. In the 1980s he worked as a senior engineer with Turbomecanica, a manufacturer of aircraft engines, wherehe coordinated the technology for SPEY 512-14 DW aircraft engine, a cooperation programme with Rolls-Royce, UK. In the 1990s he moved to South Africa where he achieved his PhD from the Electrical and Information Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. From 1998 he has been a full time academic with the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Aeronautical Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.His research interests focus on interdisciplinary research that include company integration, information systems, manufacturing processes and systems, materials science, software engineering, complex systems, and computational techniques.

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